Day 1: Vim to Emacs

Today’s my first day using Emacs at work. I picked a cognitively easy task (HTML markup editing) to practice on. Being somewhat wired up in Vim, I found myself thinking in terms of Vim operations, and trying to replicate it in Emacs. I know it’s not the most orthodox way of learning/doing Emacs, but it was the only way I knew to get started, and it’s helped me cope so far.

Here is my personal Vim to Emacs conversion table. It’s what I’ve been able to pick up and use fairly proficiently so far, in the order that made most sense to me as I picked the tool up.

“-” in the Vim column means I don’t know how it’s done, rather than Vim not being able to perform it. I expect that all these keys would work on a plain vanilla Emacs 23 install with no configuration or extra scripts added on.

You notice that I’ve used ctrl- and alt- notations directly instead of C- and M- which is the Emacs convention. I’ve done so because that’s what the labels say on the keyboard I use. Also, my brain is already bogged down enough making the cognitive leaps from Vim to Emacs, it doesn’t need to be bothered by M- to alt- and C- to ctrl- translations for now. If you’re not happy with it, go make your own list. Apologies to Mac users, you’ll have to think of alt- as your cmd- key.

Don’t put too much emphasis on the default keybindings. Emacs is about making it work like you want, so don’t accept everything just because they are default,

For example, for such a frequent operation as opening files it is stupid to use a a complex key sequence like ctrl-x ctrl-f. I use F3 instead, etc

The defaults are only suggestions and some of them are bad suggestions, so feel free to override them aggressively, instead of adapting to them. In Emacs there is no one True Way, everyone should use it the way it’s the best for him or her.